A Woman Has to Live Her Life, or Live to Repent Not Having Lived it.

29 Pages·2017·0.23 MB·English

University of Iceland
School of Humanities
Department of English

“A Woman Has to Live Her Life,
or Live to Repent Not Having Lived it.”
Female Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Women in Love
and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

B.A. Essay
Unnur Ósk Kristinsdóttir
Kt.: 070994-2089
Supervisor: Julian M. D'Arcy
May 2018
Abstract

D.H. Lawrence wrote about women in a way that was relatively unknown in the
beginning of the twentieth century. This essay explores the female characters of
Lawrence’s novels The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the
importance of sexual experience in their development and presentation. From the
publication of The Rainbow in 1915 and Women in Love in 1920 until the final version
of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, society, as well as Lawrence himself, had advanced
significantly in regards to women and their sexual freedom. However, Lawrence’s
female characters in these novels all had one thing in common; they were unaffected by
social constructions of female behaviour and sexuality. Ursula Brangwen, Gudrun
Brangwen and Connie Chatterley all experienced love and sex before marriage and their
sexual experiences had a great impact on their character development. Lawrence
emphasised the importance of young women experiencing sex in order to find
themselves and become happy. Lawrence’s characters also express feelings of all kinds
of love, as siblings and in friendship, as well as exploring love between two individuals
of the same sex. Lawrence approached the characters in the three respective novels in
different ways, which were dependent on his own personal development and advances
in his writing style. Many of the characters in Lawrence’s novels are believed to echo
his personal beliefs, though in various different ways. His approach towards female
sexuality was unique and ground breaking while also enraging and shocking to some of
his readers. Lawrence’s novels faced much criticism due to his way of writing about
women, as well as the language he used to do so. Lawrence’s language also developed,
from being relatively discreet and modest in The Rainbow and Women in Love to having
crude words and explicit sexual descriptions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s
writing was the first of its kind and impacted the approach to female sexuality in British
fiction of the later twentieth century.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1
2. The Rainbow .............................................................................................................. 4
3. Women in Love ........................................................................................................ 10
4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover ......................................................................................... .17
5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 24
Works Cited ................................................................................................................. 26
Introduction

D.H Lawrence wrote about women from a generally unspoken perspective in the British
literary scene, at a time when women were not supposed to be sexual beings or to
explore their personal feelings towards love and sex. Though his portrayal of this new
female perspective was often inaccurate and often approached through a gendered lens,
it led to a revolution in how female love and sexuality was to be written about.
Lawrence’s ideas about women and female sexuality developed significantly from his
early writing to his later novels. Lawrence also had an interesting approach to the topic
of love and sexuality in a general sense and his writing reflects much about his own life,
using concepts such as familial love, friendship and homosexuality to express his
feelings towards people. From the publication of The Rainbow in 1915 and its sequel
Women in Love in 1920 to the third and final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in
1928, his motifs and literary technique underwent a drastic change, possibly due to his
own personal development and changing thoughts and feelings.
The Rainbow tells a generational story in which the reader sees the development
of several characters. The Brangwen family is the main focus of the story but the
character of Ursula is most prominent. The novel tells a story of a young woman’s first
love and first sexual experiences as well as her struggle in combining her sexuality with
other aspects of her life. In The Rainbow Lawrence approaches the topic of women and
female sexuality from a perspective of a man whose progressive views are in line with
the times. His female characters in The Rainbow are sexually experienced before
marriage and the language of the novel points towards the marital connection being less
important to women and their development than their premarital experiences. The
language used is relatively discreet and minimal, and inexplicit imagery is used to
describe sexual encounters. Lawrence made a bold statement by including a lesbian love
scene in his novel, which was quite controversial at the time, as portrayals of lesbians
had not been seen previously in English literature and this had a great impact on how
lesbians would be viewed and portrayed in future fiction.
Women in Love continues the story in The Rainbow, where Ursula and her sister
Gudrun have become independent women who long for love and a good life. The novel
delves deeper into the emotional and spiritual aspects of love and contrasts the
emotional and physical compatibility of two couples. When Lawrence wrote Women in
1
Love he was still under much of the same influences as when he wrote The Rainbow but
the development of his female characters imply that he is inspired by the liberal women
of his time who had started standing up for themselves and their femaleness. In Women
in Love his approach to love and the different types of love is expanded and the topic of
love between family members, sisters and even friends is opened for discussion. The
topic of male friendship and homosexuality is also touched upon and makes an
interesting contrast with the lesbian love affair Lawrence writes about in The Rainbow.
Love between the sexes is also approached in a different way than Lawrence has
previously approached it, as it focuses intensely on the spiritual aspects and the
importance of emotional connection in love. The topic of polarity and duality is also a
matter of discussion and ties in with a lot of the ideas that Lawrence himself has on the
subject.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a story of a woman living in a dysfunctional
marriage where her husband suffers from a disability from a war injury. The woman,
Connie, when lacking sexual and emotional attention from her husband, seeks it
elsewhere. When Lawrence moved on to writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover he had
undergone significant changes in a lot of his writing. The novel differs significantly
from the others, specifically in regards to language and explicit descriptions. However,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover does share several aspects with the other novels, such as how
the premarital experiences and sexual affairs are a large part of the character
development of the main female character and how the adult woman is formed by her
actions as a young woman. The novel is largely from a female perspective, but as it is
written by a man its view is quite gendered and the descriptions of women through the
eyes of the male character are more descriptive than the ones from the woman herself. It
is therefore interesting to view how the male characters of the novel regard the women
in their lives. Some of the male characters, Tommy Dukes for example, are in line with
topics that Lawrence has previously addressed, like Birkin’s view of polarity, but
others, such as Mellors, have a completely different view. The novel has faced a lot of
criticism for many things, though most often it has to do with the language used to
describe sexual acts and physical relationships.
These three novels, though quite different in most aspects, share the common
thread that female characters are very important to the narratives. The women in
Lawrence’s novels are portrayed in a different way than how they had been previously
2
presented in literature and showed that women should also be viewed as sexual beings
that can display passion and love on their own terms.
Lawrence …treats female sexuality with an originality and a sense of excitement
that no man had ever brought to it before. Lawrence, to my mind, was the first
ever novelist to show, probably better than any female novelist ever had, the
strength and power of a woman’s feelings, sexual and erotic, by showing his
woman characters in relationships with men they loved passionately (Dix, 81).

3
The Rainbow

In The Rainbow women are allowed significant spiritual freedom to love and experience
different aspects of their romantic and sexual feelings. Lawrence’s language in The
Rainbow is relatively self-censored and mostly portrays female sexuality as a positive
and discreet entity using language that insinuates its existence without any explicit
descriptions.
The three generations of Brangwen women that The Rainbow portrays all have
significant sexual experience before settling down in marriage and having families that
feature in the story that unfolds in the novel. The women that the novel discusses
portray Lawrence’s ideas that women “can free themselves, but have to stick to what
nature ordains” (Dix, 34). As the novel portrays three generations of members of the
Brangwen family, we get to follow some of them from birth to adulthood. The first
Brangwen woman we are introduced to is Lydia, a widowed Polish woman with a
young daughter, who marries Tom Brangwen and settles down to a life in
Nottinghamshire. Lydia had been previously in a marriage in which, towards the end,
she was not significantly happy, but is forced to relocate to England and figure out a
new life for herself and her daughter after her husband passes away. Lydia is a strong
woman who had found work independently and was surviving splendidly before being
courted by Tom. Lydia married Tom, not out of necessity or love, but for an opportunity
to provide a better life for herself and her daughter in a better position and class. Lydia
allows Tom to take the reins in their relationship while keeping much power in her own
womanhood without becoming his property. As Dix expresses it: “Lydia does not
dominate Tom, but she certainly shows him how she expects to be treated” (35). Lydia
certainly sets the tone for the independent, strong female characters to come in the
novel. Lydia’s daughter, Anna, is the first woman the reader follows from early
childhood into adulthood. Anna is a child when she is first introduced, but her character
develops throughout the novel, creating a round, realistic presentation of a woman.
Anna grows up to be a strong, adventurous and self-assured woman who has great ideas
of becoming extraordinary. However, her options are limited in that regard and she
settles into marriage and having children at quite a young age. In spite of this, Anna
maintains her independence and fully immerses herself in the raising of her children and
expresses her liberation explicitly (Dix, 37). Anna’s first born daughter, Ursula, has the
full attention of the reader for the remaining chapters of the novel. Ursula is quite
4
possibly the most central character of the novel while also being the symbol of real
change for women in her time. “Ursula is the path, the direction” (Dix, 37). As Ursula is
the main character of a large section of the novel, she becomes even more of a
revolutionary symbol and her love affairs become proof of a change and an altered view
towards female sexuality by the society of the time. Lawrence uses the experiences of
premarital sex and love as a way for the female characters to find their own voice and
their own way to go through life (Worthen, 49). Premarital sexual experience is
therefore much more important to the development of Lawrence’s characters than any
of their marital relationships.
The Rainbow approaches the topic of marital love with little respect and portrays
lovers’ first affairs as being much more significant experiences. Two of the three main
female characters in the novel have experienced important love affairs before becoming
wives. Lydia had previously been married and therefore has a relatively significant
experience with love before she learned to live on her own for a while. Lydia developed
a lot from her first marriage and became much more independent and aware of what her
abilities were. She married Tom Brangwen after discovering herself as a single woman
who needs love and care and therefore had a much easier time settling down into
marriage. Ursula, however, is the one whose sexual experience is most important as a
young woman. Ursula is seventeen years old when her initial love affair with
Skrebensky unfolds and its impact on her is significant. As Dix explains “…she is
getting ready to define herself sexually” (38) and the rest of her life and her sexual
experience in later relationships is defined by her first sexual encounter with
Skrebensky. Lawrence makes it evident how marriage is unimportant to each of the
Brangwen women before entering it. Lydia has been married before and lets Tom
pursue her significantly before agreeing to marry him. Anna gets pleasure from
provoking her husband and loves nothing more than her children, while often she feels
nothing resembling love toward her husband. She says she physically loves him and
respects him despite not understanding him, but “Above all, she loved to bear his
children. She loved to be the source of children” (RB, 174). Again, Ursula has a
somewhat different storyline in this regard. She only really cares about marriage when it
is convenient for her. When she is proposed to by Skrebensky she has doubts, but is
tempted to give in to the comforts of marriage. When considering whether or not to
marry him, she admits that she loves him deeply, but that she cannot bear the thought of
5
marrying him and had a hard time forgiving him. “…she did not forgive him that he had
not been strong enough to acknowledge her” (RB, 347). Nonetheless, she maintains her
independence by eventually rejecting the idea of marrying him and expresses some
disgust at the idea of becoming trapped in such a social convention. For Ursula, love
was not the only thing necessary to marry someone; “She believed that love was a way,
a means, not an end in itself” (RB, 347). The one thing the Brangwen women all have in
common is that at some point they prove to have little care for marriage and express
deep feelings of dissatisfaction with their married lives. This is made clear by the way
Lawrence uses descriptions to explain their marriages and their sexual experiences.
The way sexual relationships are described in The Rainbow is through language
that is relatively discreet and with limited imagery that only suggests, without explicitly
describing, any specific acts. The novel has extensive descriptions of all variations of
love and sexual encounters, but as such, the descriptions are all on the more modest
side. Love is described several times from a few different characters’ perspectives, and
all descriptions are similar in their manner. However, when the topic of sexual acts and
physical love is approached, its descriptions vary significantly. In spite of this, sex, and
especially women having sex, is described in distinctly vague terms and mostly in a
context of experience. The most explicit description of a sexual encounter is Ursula’s
night with Anton Skrebensky, and even that is described through very particular
language that is vague and ambiguous. “She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized
upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight …. He was reeling,
summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss” (RB,
270). Marital sex is hardly ever described, most likely due to its being more sacred and
less relevant to what Lawrence thought to be the most important reason for sex. When
Lawrence’s characters proceed to encounter sexual activity, they are looking for ways to
find their own personal path and self worth. “Sex … is presented as an opportunity for
the realisation of self, as the self now above all needs to be realised” (Worthen, 38). In
this sense, Lawrence treats sex not so much as a specifically physical act, but more of a
spiritual encounter where the opportunity to find oneself is, and should be, the only
aspiration. Much of the descriptions related to the sexual encounters in the novel are
more emotional than they are physical. An example of this is how Ursula and
Skrebensky feel when it is over: “And her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul
was dissolved with agony and annihilation” (RB, 270). While the female characters of
6
The Rainbow do experience sex in a way similar to what is described of the male
characters, and they are presented as relatively equal to their male counterparts, the
female experience is even more spiritual than the male version. However, Lawrence
also allows his female characters, most specifically Ursula, to experiment much more
with their sexuality than had previously been thought decent, in a social sense. Ursula is
able to have love affairs without them necessarily ending with marriage and
experiments with other kinds of love as Lawrence attempts to present his characters’
sexual activity and relationships without connecting them explicitly to their capabilities
to provide or be in a good relationship, or even their sexual orientation. The sexual
encounters are simply means to describe the characters’ “ways of finding and being
themselves” (Worthen, 49). As a result, the language used to describe sex is modest and
refrains from explicit wordings and focuses more on the emotional aspects of sex.
The relevance of presenting a lesbian love affair in The Rainbow has been much
discussed throughout the years since the novel’s original publication and is a very clear
example of how lesbians were viewed at the time. Ursula Brangwen’s love affair with
her teacher Winifred Inger is just as significant to her development as a woman as any
of her sexual experiences with men as a young woman. Dix muses with the idea that
this lesbian encounter is a Lawrentian attempt at portraying Ursula as a unique,
passionate and independent young woman looking for inspiration. “Ursula felt her
whole life begin when Miss Inger came into the room” (RB, 283). To Ursula, the love
she has for Inger was the same kind of love as she had for men, only more beautiful
because she is a woman. “What was important to Ursula was how to attain the pride and
freedom of a man, with the essential beauty that still lies in being a woman” (Dix, 38).
Ursula is greatly inspired by Winifred and learns a lot from her about herself, society,
and what it means to be a woman. However, towards the end of their relationship Ursula
does begin to have doubts about their connection and their relations, most likely due to
the fact that Winifred is a woman. She begins to be disgusted by her physically, “Her
female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and her arms were too thick” (RB, 289).
This does not come as a surprise to Winifred, who seems to have been expecting Ursula
to give up on their relationship and conform to society’s heteronormative expectations.
“The fine, unquenchable flame of the younger girl would consent no more to mingle
with the perverted life of the elder woman” (RB, 289). Feminist critics have criticized
Lawrence’s portrayal of a lesbian woman and a lesbian affair. “Winifred Inger has
7